Posts: 6

Topic: Lack of international support

In all the widgets that I have tried, there was no support for characters outside of ASCII-7. Even when the texts used where correct, it was sometime impossible to understand them because of too many holes in them. That is, it is impossible:

to input characters necessary for common languages such as French, Spanish, German, etc;

to have the same characters displayed in the widgets: RSS reader, social widgets (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed…), corporate widget and so. This is very problematic for all the non-English users.

For us, it would be necessary to have UTF-8 support, so we can read texts with letters such as "é, ê, ñ, À, Œ, ç".

Re: Lack of international support

The Flash Player in the chumby supports Unicode, and will parse content encoded in UTF-8.

However, since the actual fonts are included in the widgets, it's up to each widget developer to include the necessary character sets.

There are several Japanese widgets that do this already.

I recently developed a widget with Openlaszlo. I faced the issue with the missing characters. I spent almost two hours trying to fix it. I finally had to include a font that supports UTF-8 in the widget itself. It looks like that the default font of chumby_flashplayer doesn't support non-ascii characters. And I didn't find any other way to make it work.